1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a wave form signal generating apparatus designed to memorize a wave form data in the form of a floating point representation for reproducing a desired musical tone based on the memorized wave form data.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Disclosed in Japanese Patent Early Publication No. 60-63593 is a wave form signal generating apparatus of this kind in which a plurality of sampling data of a desired wave form are memorized in the form of a floating point representation consisting of a mantissa and an exponent. In such a prior art wave form signal generating apparatus, the memory capacity can be reduced since the mantissa and exponent of the sampling data are memorized as a compressed information. The digit numbers of the mantissa and exponent each are, however, fixed. For this reason, the high digit of the exponent would become useless for a small sampling data if the digit number of the exponent were increased to expand a dynamic range of the sampling data. In case the digit number of the mantissa were increased to minimize an error in reproduction of the desired musical tone, the dynamic range of the sampling data would be reduced.